The Story So Far

Being a History of the Invisible College from Its Foundation to the
PresentVersion 1.2 - 13 May 1993

I

We start in Sumer. The Sumerians had nearly a thousand years of
uninterrupted cultural development. Even if they did not steal the arts
of civilization from someone else (as the myth of Inanna and Enki would
seem to imply), this gives them plenty of time to attain what in Zadig
Voltaire calls the ``old Chaldean philosophy'' (i.e., old Sumerian natural
science); he specifically mentions heliocentricism, a realization of the
vast size of the universe, atoms and an accurate astronomy.

After the formation of the Persian Empire, there were a series of
international conferences among the scholars who had inherited Sumerian
science, beginning with the meeting of Thales (the first Greek
philosopher) and Jeremiah in Egypt. (Bertrand Russell has preserved
Conspiracy traditions of this epochal meeting in several passages of his
Autobiography and his Collected Stories.) The Conspiracy proper,
however, was inaugurated at a conference held in Balkh under the auspices
of Zarathustra (Greek Zoroaster) in his native city of Balkh (Greek Bactra).
The aging Thales attended, as did Pythagoras (fl. -532), the prophet Daniel,
Lao Tzu, whose Tao Te Ching was written while waiting for
customs
inspectors to handle his baggage on the way tither, and the Indian
scholar-prince Gautama Siddhartha, who later repudiated the project and
specifically refused to teach natural philosophy. The putative reason was
probably a convocation of ``wise men'' to interpret some passing omen.

II

The original goal of the Conspiracy was the complete understanding of
nature, for the betterment of mankind.

III

The Indian branch of the Conspiracy was prevented by Gautama
Siddhartha's anti-conspiracy of Buddhism from playing any decisive role
in history. It nonetheless persevered and endured, and was responsible
for numerous advances in alchemy, mathematics and neuroscience.

IV

The Greek branch made great mathematical and theoretical progress.
Little is known of the supposed founder of atomism, Leucippus; were it
not for his dates (fl. -440), we would take him for an alias of
Pythagoras; given that some techniques of life extension were probably
known to the Conspiracy even at this early date, it cannot be ruled out.
His pupil, Democritus of Abdera (fl. -420), wrote three highly important
works - the Lesser World System, an exposition of Newtonian mechanics,
On Irrational Atoms, on quantum mechanics, and the Greater
World-System, including relativity and quantum gravity. His On
Magnets explains classical electrodynamics.

Beginning with Plato, the Greek school took more of a cybernetic turn,
becoming concerned with intelligence-augmentation (disguised as the
ability to ``see'' the Forms), pattern, and self-moving and
self-organization. (Plato's statement that Democritus' books should be
burnt has been greatly misunderstood, which is curious, as almost
everyone has said similar things about books they were forced to read as
students.) The trend continued with Plato's student Aristotle, a
biologist strongly interested in teleology. (The modern "beginning" of
cybernetics is a paper by Wiener, Rosenbleuth and Bigelow entitled
``Behavior, Purpose and Teleology;'' Rosenbleuth is a cardiologist.) It is
not insignificant that Alexander, Aristotle's pupil, sought to extend the
Greek world to India and China.

The cybernetic branch reached new heights with Archimedes, who
employed CAD and CAM techniques in his design of military and astronomical
hardware. This brought on the wrath of Rome, always hostile to the
Conspiracy, perhaps because Romulus and Remus themselves were failed or
rebellious experiments of the Conspiracy. Apparently some of the Romans
wished to appropriate Archimedes' talents, and the decision to execute
him was not unanimous. Similarly, the reason nothing came of Heron of
Alexandria's invention of the steam engine is that it was repressed by
the Empire.

V

The Chinese branch of the conspiracy passed from Lao Tzu after his
return from the West to Confucius (K'ung Fu Tzu, -552 to -479).
Admittedly, it is written that ``The subjects on which the Master never
talked were: extraordinary things (natural prodigies), unnatural
strength, disorders (in Nature) and spiritual beings'' (Analects 8:20),
which would be a fair description of what the Conspiracy is about.
However, we know that Master K'ung had a secret as well as a public
doctrine (Analects 11:11), probably only transmitted to favored pupils
such as Yen Hui, and the classic known as the Ta Hsueh,
``The Great Learning,'' enjoins ``the investigation of things'' and the
ordering of the
knowledge thus gained as the basis of a properly human life.
From these disciples the Conspiracy passed to Mo Ti (-479 to -381), an inventor
and
moral prophet who established a religio-military-scientific order, and
perhaps more importantly to the Chi Hsia academy of the state of Ch'i.
This was founded by Tsou Yen (-350 to -270), the inventor of the ``five
element'' theory. This does not actually refer to elements, but rather to
processes or powers, and it is, in fact, an encoded description of the
four fundamental forces and the second law of thermodynamics; the first
law is encoded in the doctrine of the mutual production and absorption of
the forces.

The influence of Tsou Yen and the Academy was immense. In the words of
biochemist and historian of science Joseph Needham, ``If Tsou Yen had had
the `know-how' of the atomic bomb in his possession he could hardly have
faced the rulers of the States with a steadier eye.'' Academicians included
the greatest of the Confucians, Meng Tzu (the Latin Mencius, -374 to
-289); the Taoist Chuang Chou, an authority on biology, feedback, expert
systems, binary arithmetic as exemplified in the I Ching (on which
see below) and a poet of no slight skill; the logician, atomist and minister
Hui Shih, who was Chuang's verbal sparing partner, the Mohist scholar
Sung Hsing and the Confucian Hsün Ch'ing (-298 to -238), who advocated
the perfection of both humanity and nature through the application of
knowledge and learning.

Among Hs&uumln Ch'ing's pupils were Han Fei (d. -233) and Li Ssu, the
founders of the brutal and totalitarian philosophy known as Legalism.
Under their direction the semi-barbarian state of Ch'in undertook a
campagain of conquest which ended with the unification of China in -221.
(In fact, the name ``China'' derives from that of Ch'in.) It seems probable
that these renegades sold to Ch'in some secret of immense military
importance. Needham's quote above gives us a clue to what it was: Tsou
Yen did know how to build atomic bombs, though given the difficulties of obtained enriched uranium in the fourth century B.C., probably only
very small ones.

Ch'in rule was brief but devastating. Under Ch'in Shih Huang Ti (roughly:
``Mr. Ch'in, First Divine Autocrat''), books, except for a handful of
agricultural manuals judged useful to the state, were burned. So were
scholars. Revolt was inevitable, and indeed Ch'in fell in -207, in
rebellions in which Confucian, Taoist and Mohist scholars played major
roles. Taking advantage of the chaos of the period, the Conspiracy
confused many of the books which might otherwise have broadcast their
knowledge wholesale, such as the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, and simply removed from circulation others, including the
completely works of Tsou Yen. They then went more or less underground, though
they appear to have had some sort of understanding with the Han and T'ang
dynasties.

It may be asked how Joseph Needham, FRS, Master of Caius College, knew
that Tsou Yen mastered nuclear physics millennia before Curie. The answer
is, of course, that Needham was a member of the Conspiracy, as his book
Man a Machine admirably proves. Indeed, his Science and Civilisation
in China is essential to a proper understanding of the Conspiracy,
especially volume two. Needham has shown - or rather, revealed - that
Tsou was the founder of alchemy, a technique requiring deep insight into
nuclear physics (for transmutation), biology and thermodynamics. Given
the close connection between entropy and time, it is not at all
surprising that, as Needham shows, and is independently confirmed by
Mircea Eliade's The Forge and the Crucible, alchemy is intimately involved with the control of time, and the replication of the original
condition of the universe - precisely what is attempted in particle
accelerators.

(The Chinese drug ling-chih, identified with the Vedic soma and hence the Zoroastrian haoma, is
generally admitted to have been influential in the origins of alchemy. We
can now see that this was not, as is commonly thought, a hallucinogenic,
but a nootrophic; or perhaps both a hallucinogenic and a nootrophic.)

Needham presents a compelling case for the ``Hyperboreans'' of the Greeks
being the Chinese; but there is equally strong evidence (involving the
European amber trade, etc.) that the Hyperboreans were also the Britons.
This is not a contradiction; either the Britons as a whole, or perhaps
merely their upper classes, were emigrees from China. (The Irish diaspora
is thus the Yellow Peril in action.) The various henges and standing
stones of the British Isles and Armorica are not aligned for the
astronomy of -2000 or -1000, as is commonly thought, but for thousand
years into the future. In this remote northern wilderness, members of the
Conspiracy created these vast devices which even now bide their time,
waiting to fulfill their unknown purposes in strange aeons when the stars
are right. Is it coincidence that with the accelerator ring at Fermilab
there stands a replica of Stonehenge, and that it was completed
under budget? Some would object to this on the grounds that the
Britons were painted savages. Anyone familiar with academic politics, however, knows that burning rivals in wicker cages is positively tame by the
standards of some institutions, and while head-hunting may not be the
most effective way of establishing tenure, it cannot be much worse than
current systems. It is worth noting that the Irish were, with the
Italians, almost the only inhabitants of western Europe to preserve some
civilization after the barbarian invasions, and that the Catholic and
Celtic churches were implacable rivals.

VI

After Tsou Yen's time, owing to a number of unsuccessful attempts to
establish what Needham refers to as the ``rule of the saints,'' the Chinese
branch of the conspiracy was forced to go underground and rely on methods
of misdirection, concealing their discoveries in an elaborate mystical
code. Thus, alchemy travelled to the west, there to join with the fruits
of the atomists and the Platonists - or, as we now know them, the
cyberneticians. (The text on alchemy attributed to Democritus is probably
a fragment of a festschrift, perhaps contributed by Tsou Yen himself. It
is known that Democritus travelled extensively, but exactly where is
unclear. It can hardly be ruled out that he was one of Tsou Yen's
teachers.)

VII

The Hebrew branch of the Conspiracy flowered at this time, becoming
highly active in alchemy, and, with the Kabbala, in the information-theoretic
aspects of the Conspiracy. Indeed, in Science and Civilisation in China Needham has numerous references to the services ``Israel'' rendered to the cause.

In this connection, it may be noted that the Crucifixion was a student
prank. We know from the Gospels that young Joshua ben Joseph was
educated. This implies that his family was, too. One of the classic early
works of European alchemy was written by one Mary when she was in Egypt;
recall the improbability of a prole learning to read, much less becoming
a rabbi. In all probability it is as misleading to say that Joseph was
``only'' a carpenter as to say that Epictetus was ``only'' a slave or Spinoza
``only'' a lens-grinder.

We also know that Joshua was something of an enfant terrible, fond of
confounding his teachers, among others. We suggest that the Crucifixion
was a practical joke perpetrated by Jesus and his fellow students - Simon
Peter, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene and the rest. It was Passover;
they were feeling festive; they went to Jerusalem and saw Pontius Pilate
(perhaps at some sort of awards ceremony). They demanded that he impose
as the official truth the story that Joshua had been crucified, died
after only a few hours, and arose three days later, etc. - a story
compounded of narrative improbabilities and borrowings from pagan
mythology.

Pilate was understandably incredulous. Joshua and his fellow students
threatened dire consequences if he didn't do as they asked. His famous
question has been misrepresented. It was not Quid est veritas, ``What
is
truth?'' (as satirized by Voltaire in his _Philosophical Dictionary_, sub
``Truth'') but Quid est probitas, "What is the proof?" - note that
there are no articles in Latin. He did not stay for an answer because he saw
it. The Sermon on the Mount was the detonation of a very clean and
man-portable nuclear weapon. (We did mention that Joshua et al. were part
of the Conspiracy, didn't we? No? Oh well.) No doubt the traditional text
was far more effective coming from someone who had just demonstrated how
effectively one could be smitten upon one cheek. Consider the words of
St. Paul: ``Now we we see as through a glass, darkly; but then, face to
face... Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we
shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the
last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed.'' This is entirely accurate,
provided one remembers that the dead will be raised into the
stratosphere, and that vapor and plasma are entirely incorruptible.

Pontius Pilate agreed; indeed all Jerusalem agreed. Rarely has a
student prank been more successful. In fact, it is unlikely that anyone
involved thought as many people would fall for it as eventually did.

What became of Joshua is unknown; He may, perhaps, have departed with
the Three Wise Men to study supernova astronomy in the East. In any event,
His tomb is still shown in a very pretty valley in Kashmir. It may be
significant that there are number of confessions from +I, supposedly
written by Peter, Paul, or even JC Himself, explaining everything away.

The way in which Christianity made the transition from student prank
to world religion is curious. Around the beginning of the modern era, there
were many similar cults floating around the Near East, and the
Roman empire in general. At the time all were fairly small. But in +III,
there were massive plagues. Much of the empire was
depopulated, allowing the barbarians to move in. Shortly thereafter,
Christianity came to power. Obviously, Christianity rode the first
version of virus which inspires millenarian religious madnesses. Somehow
one strain got loose in the Mediterranean basin somewhat before the birth
of Christ; it proliferated; a mutant version killed lots of people before
being brought under control; the surviving strains were potent enough to
swell Christianity - especially among the armies, always an important
vector - and at the same time to produce numberless heresies. (For
obscure reasons, most focused on the nature of the trinity.) As the virus
subsided, the dark ages ensued. We may at this juncture mention that it
was a clone of Hypatia, and not the actual last librarian of Alexandria,
who was seized by a mob in the streets, carried into a church and there
torn apart with clamshells, an act for whose organization (and other,
similar services to the Faith) Archbishop Cyril was canonized. Had the
ecclesia not been bugged as a matter of course, things would no doubt
have been different.

VIII

Muhammad was at least a sympathizer if not a member of the Conspiracy.
The organization and perfection of nature account for a clear plurality
of the verse of the Koran, and his injunction, ``Seek knowledge, even if
it be as far away as China,'' is distinctly suspicious. The Islamic
empires were always generous in their patronage of science, which they
acquired from Jewish and remaining pagan sources - which is to say, they
were lavish supporters of the Conspiracy. (This allows us to realize that
Hassan-i-Sabbah, the epynomous founder of the Assassins, was not a member
of the Conspiracy, since he killed their patrons. In fact, since Omar
Khayyam was part of the Conspiracy, and Khayyam and Sabbah were
friends
at the university, it seems likely that Sabbah was actively opposed to it. Given his admiration of Sabbah, it is clear that William S. Burroughs
is a member of an anti-conspiracy, insofar as his limited supply of
neurons allows him to be part of anything.) The Knights Templar were
derived from these Islamic conspirators, though they were a splinter
group with only the most foggy understanding of the goals. (This was
still understanding enough for them to be suppressed by the Holy Roman
Catholic Church, which inherited the Imperium's hostility towards the
Conspiracy.)

It was during this Islamic flowering of the Conspiracy that the
ambitious ``Cthulhu Project'' was begun at Iram, the City of Many Pillars.
Among the spin-offs of the project was that strange and fascinating
volume, the Kitab al-Azif; but a proper discussion of this fascinating
topic would take us too far afield, and the reader is referred to the
appendix.

In all probability it was the increasing success of hostile forces
within Dahr al-Islam, such as the Assassins and theologians, and without,
such as Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan, that prompted the
conspiracy to pull up stakes and return to Europe, a move aided by the
existence of European scholars with a sound Moorish (i.e. Conspiratorial)
training. Some, such as Roger Bacon, were even admitted to the
Conspiracy. (Bacon's "brazen head" is an obvious misunderstanding of a
computer with advanced natural language capabilities.)

Italy was chosen as the best place to start. The Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II ruled large portions, was fully conversant with Islamic
science and nearly defeated the papacy. The Islamic and Jewish presence
helped, as did a Latin conspiratorial tradition, lingering from the days
of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archimedes, Lucretius, and Virgil the
sorcerer. The Renaissance which followed was distinguished for its
excellence in science, technology, Pythagoreanism and other forms of
encoded science, and game theory. (The Medici, as their name indicates,
were originally a medical family, and thus easy targets for Conspiracy
influence. That Niccolo Machiavelli dedicated his treatise on the more
applied and technological aspects of game theory to Lorenzo the
Magnificent is not without interest.)

The late middle ages and Renaissance were an extremely fertile period
for schism, heresy and general affronts to orthodoxy. Some of these
movements, such as the Homines Intelligentiae, were cloaks, tools or
allies of the Conspiracy. Others, however, were spawned by the Black
Death. This dreaded disease originated in Central Asia, and was not, as
is commonly believed, a version of Pasteurella pestis, the bubonic
plague, but of the millenarian virus, breed to renewed virulence by the
Conspiracy in its hidden Central Asian strongholds, known to some as
Leng. The disease came to Europe when corpses killed by it were
catapulted into a Genoese trading post on the Black Sea by marauding
Kipchak Turks. (This is the oldest recorded instance of biological
warfare.) The initial result was massive carnage, often accompanied by
outbreaks of St. Vitus' dance, which has many parallels among the Cargo
Cults (see below).

As the survivors came to grips with the catastrophe, and - equally
important - adapted to the virus, the effects became more subtle, but no
less important - schisms, heresies, blasphemy, political and social chaos
and a demand for labor-saving machinery. Europeans have continued to
adapt to the virus, until now its most overt manifestation is
schizophrenia. (Others include fundamentalists, Theosophists and other
pop occultists, William Blake, admiration of Napoleon and oracular
philosophy, and a general tendency to ideological infatuation.) When
introduced to previously unexposed populations, it helps reduce the
population, along with such diseases as smallpox, and leads to such
collective madnesses as the Cargo Cults, the Ghost Dance and the famous
movement among the Xhosa.

Ecclesiastical efforts to crush the heresies and Renaissance were
unsuccessful. The Inquisition was instituted to combat heresy, Jews and
Moors - the Church new who its enemies were - but found itself hopelessly
overwhelmed, especially when it broadened its scope to include all the
wizards, witches and scientists it could lay hands on. The witches were
not, of course, true members of the Conspiracy, but a splinter group and
a fragment, descending from those members of the Conspiracy who, trapped
by the barbarian invasion, muddled through as best they could. It is thus
evident that the number of true witches caught by the Conspiracy was
vanishingly small. Indeed, of all the hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, handed over to the secular arm to be killed mercifully, and
without the shedding of blood - which is to say, at the stake - it is
unlikely that more than a hundred were genuine witches, let alone
Conspirators. The Church is understandably embarrassed about this, and it
is not surprising that the Holy Office today keeps a very low profile
indeed.

IX

The Renaissance and Conspiracy moved north, with the Jews, to
Holland, and to central Europe, having first prudently instigated the
Reformation, beginning with Professor Wycliffe of Oxford, followed by
Huss in Bohemia, and culminating in Dr. Martin Luther in Germany. Luther
was a strong proponent of alchemy. (The millenarian virus did not make
the Reformation's work any harder.)

It was in Germany - in particular, Bavaria - that Rene Descartes
(1596-1630) had his central philosophical insights, including those on
treating living things as automata. It was in Prague that the Emperor Rudolf
encouraged the sciences and practiced alchemy; in Prague that Rabbi Low,
the collaborator of Rudolf, made his Golem. That revenants are especially
well-reported from the empire of Austria-Hungary; that the word ``robot''
was coined by the Czech write Capek, whose War with the Newts is about
the replacement of humanity by another species, one initially augmented
by H. sapiens; that John von Neumann, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller were
all Hungarians, cannot be coincidence.

But meanwhile Holland, a miniscule country lacking in natural
resources, was enjoying an astonishing increase in material wealth - no doubt
through the clandestine use of such conspiracy techniques as mass
production. Here Spinoza, the biological descendant of Spanish Jews and
the philosophical descendant of Descartes, waged his theoretical battles
against superstition and for a metaphysic uniquely adapted to the
findings of science. (His views were latter to exert great influence on
the Romantics; Shelley quoted him in extenso). Holland in this time
served as the intellectual hub and refuge of Europe. Leibnitz,
undoubtedly a conspirator, interested in mathematical logic, calculating
machines and monads (an early sort of cellular automata) went there to
study under Spinoza; John Locke helped Holland export its capitalism and
science to England, then in the throws of a revolution undoubtedly
engineered by the Conspiracy (as Needham himself hints).

Newton did not himself visit Holland, but was in extensive
correspondence with Dutch scientists, and in any case Francis Bacon was
without question a member of the Conspiracy - among several others. (On
balance, it seems unlikely that William Shakespeare, who ghost-wrote for
Bacon, was a Conspirator, merely the greatest poet in the English
language.) In addition to his mathematical and physical research, Newton
was intensely interested in alchemy and the decoding of sacred texts,
seeking to recover knowledge he was sure the ancients had possessed - and
he specifically mentioned the Chaldeans.

The Newton-Leibnitz split probably accounts for the lack of an overt
Conspiratorial presence in eighteenth century England. Highly
significant, however, is the fact that Voltaire went to England and
absorbed Newtonian physics, Lockean philosophy and an admiration for the
English revolution. (His mistress of several decades was a physicist who
translated Newton's works from Latin into French.) Voltaire was probably
the most effective propagandist for the conspiracy since Martin Luther.
His classic Candide presents its vision of the ``best of all possible
worlds,'' and his efforts against the Church succeeded in breaking its
power even in the most powerful Catholic country of the time. That one of
the industries he encouraged on his estate at Ferney was clock-making is
not without symbolic significance.

The English Romantics were a direct out-growth of the eighteenth
century Enlightenment, of which Voltaire was the embodiment, if not the
controlling intelligence. (A churchman said of him, ``The devil has given
all the powers of Hell into his hands.'') Shelley's favorite authors were
Benjamin Franklin (a scientist, a friend of Voltaire, and a Mason) and
Lucretius, both, undoubtedly, members of the Conspiracy; he was strongly
interested in science and industrial development. Keats was an
ex-pharmacist, and his poetry displays a suspicious knowledge of the
orbital chaos of Hyperion. Mary Shelley, the wife of the poet, wrote
extensively on the subjects of artificial intelligence, artificial life
and biotechnology. (It is no doubt significant that Shelley's play
Hellas contains an astonishing display of applied psychology and
cognitive science by a Jewish Cabbalist.)

That the Romantics moved to Italy can only indicate that they were
seeking access to some hidden, perhaps abandoned, resource of the
Conspiracy. Now, from the classic text on alchemy, the Nei P'ien of the
great Ko Hung, it is clear that from +320 at the latest nanotechnology
has been available to the Conspiracy. (The English translation, Alchemy,
Medicine and Religion in the China of 320 A.D., by Ware, is published,
significantly enough, by the MIT Press.) This has two important
implications: First, the powers now available to the Conspiracy are
beyond anything we can imagine. Second, the higher ranks of the
Conspiracy are no longer humans pur sang. At the very least, they will
have purged themselves of such ills that flesh is heir to as cancer,
senility and dandruff. It would be foolish to conjecture what more
profound transformations they have effected in the last seventeen
centuries. Bearing this in mind, and remembering that the descendants of
the Romantics, including Friedrich ``Man is something to be surpassed''
Nietzche, the Anarchists, the Fascists and to some extent even the
Bolsheviks with their ideal of the ``New Soviet Man,'' eagerly anticipated
and sought to produce a new, perfected variety of human, or super-human.
The Romantics, then, were a movement of ``transhumanism for the masses,''
who desired to throw open the gates of evolution and let people make of
themselves what they would, free of restraint and convention. Perhaps
they met their end at the hands of anti-conspiracies; or were silenced by
less radical branches of the Conspiracy itself; or, perhaps, they met
their untimely, if not outright mysterious, ends through mere
coincidence. The extreme pains Mary Shelley took over the publication of
her husband's poems show that they are intricately constructed allegories
for the knowledge and goals of the conspiracy, probably involving
multiple ciphers.

Exactly what the Romantics sought in Italy is unknown. In addition to
being the birthplace of the Renaissance and modern humanism, it was in
Italy that Virgil worked his sorceries and prophesied the Golden Age,
when the liabilities of the body would trouble humanity no more; in Italy
were born Romulus and Remus, whose strange story practically reeks of
genetic experimentation; where Empedocles, too, prophesied the Golden
Age, and claimed to have become more than human, and to similarly enhance
others; where the mysterious Etruscans settled after their migration from
an unknown part of Asia; where, according to tradition, the Cyclopses,
monsters and technologists of divine skill, had their haunts; where Circe
lived, who turned animals into men, and men into uncanny things; and it
was in Italy that Daedalus, creator of the Minotaur, who when forced to
fly gave himself wings, sought asylum from the wrath of King Minos. (In
1924, J.B.S. Haldane wrote a book called Daedalus, or, Science and the
Future, in which he predicted bioengineering and transhumanism, and took
Daedalus as the patron of these movements. He pointed out that, despite
crimes ranging from murdering his nephew through usurping numerous divine
prerogatives to the treacherous killing of a son of Zeus, Daedalus did
not go to Tartarus, or even Hades, and Socrates, teacher of Plato,
claimed him as an ancestor.) Clearly, Italy's association with these
matters is neither new nor shallow, nor, as Umberto Eco, Primo Levi and
Italo Calvino are unquestionably part of the Conspiracy, over.

(Goethe was a Romantic too, of course, though he later gave that up.
Before then he had studied alchemy extensively, and written ``The
Sorcerer's Apprentice,'' which was to so fascinate Norbert Wiener.
Goethe's ambivalence about the Conspiracy found such outlets as his
attack on Newton and his Faust (``two souls war within my breast,'' etc.),
who, significantly enough, finds salvation in a flood-control effort in
the Netherlands. Cf. Needham on the importance of hydraulic engineering,
and Freeman Dyson on Goethe's influence on him.)

X

Despite this set-back, the British branch of the Conspiracy remained
vigorous. The Empire was not acquired ``in a fit of absentmindedness,'' but
as a calculated policy of acquiring the research of scattered colleagues.

The Industrial Revolution was more problematic. The Conspiracy had
encouraged James Watt and the other early inventors, but it soon had
doubts. No doubt because of the miniscule size of the Conspiracy they had
not considered the possibility that technology might spread and grow
exponentially. By the mid 1800s the means were being put in place to
derail industrialism if it was deemed necessary. The American Civil War
showed the tremendous carnage which even relatively primitive mass
production made possible. Marx, a member of the Conspiracy, whose time in
the British Museum was certainly not spent in solitary study, readied the
proletariat. Darwin and Huxley demolished what lingering power the
churches possessed.

The Analytical Engine was in part a challenge to Babbage and Byron's
daughter Ada Lovelace - could they make a computer with the primitive
``technology'' of the laity? - and in part a test of industrialism.
Evidently it was decided that Lovelace and Babbage had come (in Wiener's
phrase) ``too damn close,'' and that technological progress would have to
be squashed.

The chosen means was the Great War. If matters had gone according to
plan, it would in fact have been over in a few months, as everyone
thought in 1914, and Europe would have been reduced to slag. The
generals, however, were simply too stupid. The Conspiracy therefore
turned to their fall-back plan, engineering the October Revolution and
the entry of America into the war. (Come now, you don't really think
Wilson's stroke was only that, do you?)

But even this went awry. The Revolution failed to spread; Versailles
was a disaster; the League of Nations was useless as a tool of the
Conspiracy. At this point leadership of the British branch had passed to
Bertrand Russell, a man intensely interest in mathematics, philosophy,
science and the "best of all possible worlds," whose family had been
influential in the creation of the Empire. It is no coincidence that he
trained Wiener and the Logical Positivists of Vienna; was a partisan of
Einstein and quantum mechanics; held political views which might serve as
the archetype for those of a branch of the conspiracy discussed by
Needham in his crucial vol. 2, taking as a motto the saying of Lao Tzu,
``Production without possession, action without self-assertion,
development without domination.'' He went to Russia in 1920 but returned
intensely disappointed by the experience and horrified by Lenin. Who can
say what happened to Vladimir Illych on board that sealed train to the
Finland Station? All that is clear is that the Revolution was hijacked by
anti-Conspiracy forces at its birth.

On his return from the Soviet Union Russell travelled to China,
probably to confer with the Secret Masters of the Conspiracy, and incidentally
immerse himself in the traditional culture and learning. It is not clear
what decision was reached - if any at all. Some of the Secret Masters are
at least two thousand years old; they are patient people (if that is the
right noun), as such projects as the henges and Cthulhu indicate, and for
them to take a mere nine years to formulate and implement a plan is
arguably hasty.

The Great Depression, like all speculative bubbles, was an exercise in
human greed and stupidity. But the _reason_ humans were, on this
occasion, so exceptionally greedy and stupid, was the early Orbital Mind
Control Lasers employed by the Conspiracy. From there, of course, they
could let matters take their own course, and offer their services to the
Allies when they had no choice but to accept the Conspiracy at whatever
terms They chose to offer.

The Conspiracy did not merely provide the Allies with beads and rum, but
many useful tidbits of technological information, such as nuclear weapons
and modern genetics. The price They exacted, however, was control over
technological development, a measure of political power and unrestricted
recruiting from the allies citizens. The Allies agreed; Heisenberg
sabotaged the German bomb effort; Hoffmann unleashed LSD; the Manhattan
Project and radar were born.

Of course, as soon as they had won, the Allies, with the exception of
Britain, attempted to renege on their agreements. The Russians supported
Mao and Lysenko; the Americans introduced McCarthyism; and the French
refused to give up their Empire. Rosalind Franklin, a Conspirator and
co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was killed to prevent recognition
of her work; Wiener grew apocalyptic; Oppenheimer was ruined; Einstein
was the victim of a subtle poison. Russell became sufficiently frustrated
to announce at an East-West conference of scientists that "Now is the
time to drop the Bomb." In the end, however, the Conspiracy triumphed,
though some might consider the means employed, which appear to have
included everyone from Sakharov and the Non-Aligned Bloc through Mario
Savio and LSD to Elvis Presley, a tad extreme. (Elvis is in fact alive,
and is a staff physicist at Fermilab, when not writing under his pen-name
of J. B. Priestly. See the Weekly World News of spring 1992. Timothy
Leary never left Algeria; the current cybertwit may be either a human
imposter or an android.)

XI

The current century has witnessed an unprecedented degree of political
activity on the part of the Conspiracy consists. It consists, in the
main, of people whom, for want of a better word, may be described as
technogeeks. It is hard to over-emphasise this.

It does not matter that the people who established the Conspiracy had
high ideals. [i.e. the complete control of nature, for the betterment of
mankind.] This fell by the wayside very quickly, given all the neat
stuff that the Conspiracy became able to do. Knowledge for knowledge's
sake - and technology for technology's sake - was the order of the day
for centuries.

Technogeeks are not interested primarily in power over, or control of,
people. They are interested more in questions like, "How does this
work?" ``How can I attach device A to device B? What's going to happen
if I do?'' ``Can we build a working starship? What's there to see out
there?'' Francis Bacon admirably summarized the plan as ``the effecting of
all things possible.'' Give a technogeek the choice between puttering
around trying out something new, and having to deal with a raging mob
outside, most will choose the lab... Except if the raging mob decides to
go into the lab. The Secret Masters of the Conspiracy are the ultimate
in tenured professors - if left to incubate their unimaginable projects
in peace, they are content. When, in the past, they have used their
power, it is largely to these ends.

There are exceptions to this. Some members of the Conspiracy have
been highly political (perhaps ones who drew the short straws) - but for the
most part, most of the Conspiracy couldn't care less about political
power, about what the laity think, and so forth - just so long as they go
unmolested (which is why they do things behind closed doors - if you
allow any old idiot to wander in and look at your stuff, who knows what
they'll do with it...)

Since the Industrial Revolution, however, it has become clear that
keeping the laity out will become increasingly difficult. The science and
technics of the ``proles'' are increasing exponentially, much faster than
those of the Conspiracy. It is estimated that within no more than two
centuries, if nothing intervenes, the Conspiracy's technological
advantage will vanish, and with it, probably, their secrecy. Any solution
to this (for the Conspiracy) knotted problem involves gaining political
power, and substantial amounts of it at that. Viewed in this light,
Marx's dictum that while hitherto the philosophers had merely tried to
describe the world, their real task was to change it, assumes new
significance. Russell would also seem to have belong to this school of
thought,as a perusal of his works, especially The Problem of China,Power and Skeptical Essays makes clear. This
faction seems to have been successful, though the use to which the
Conspiracy intends to put its accumulating power is unclear.

It could attempt to halt industrialism at some safe level of ignorance
and inefficiency, but such a situation seems dangerously explosive,
liable to relapse into exponential growth at any time. They could attempt
to sabotage or over-drive industrialism until, like the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge, it rips itself apart - but the obvious danger is that the
Conspiracy will be brought down with it.

The more secure alternative is a take-over. If the Conspiracy has
secure political and economic control, its loss of technical advantage,
or even secrecy, will be compensated for. Sometime within the next two
centuries, then, the Conspiracy will, overtly or otherwise, assume power,
and their tame Übermenschen will see to it that the Tenured Masters can
return to their projects in peace. It seems not unlikely that Project
Cthulhu will have a role in this, as will a new strain of the millenarian
virus known, interestingly enough, as ``Calamari.''

Something of this may be gleaned from the list of current known
members of the Conspiracy. These include K. Eric Drexler, who seems to have
inherited the alchemical tradition; John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton
Friedman, whose public squabbles over economics are a mere camouflage;
Freeman Dyson; Stanislaw Lem; Fang Lizhi; Abdus Salam; Akio Morita; Karl
Popper; Marvin Minsky and other members of the artificial intelligentsia
(cf. the denunciation by ``Timothy Leary'' of ``engineer-philosophers like
Marvin Minsky'' in Mondo 2000). If you or someone you know is an
aspiring technogeek, Ubermensch or, better yet, Ubergeek, it behooves you
to get in on the ground floor now by contacting the nearest Conspiracy
recruiter as soon as possible. You may already be one of Them without
knowing it.

The latest head of the Conspiracy is of course Feynman, whose death
was - like those of many other leaders of the Conspiracy, from Democritus on -
carefully faked; he has sailed into the West on an O-ring, to the secret
strongholds of the Conspiracy in Inner Asia, for which Tannu Tuva is no
more than a blind, but will assuredly return when his people need him.